Just a man with the bitcoin touch

Bitcoin will be central to the DEFCAD revolution

Dear friends, I just saw the future, and it is completely distributed.

Earlier today, Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed (where you can download printable gun parts) released a video that gave me as much hope as bitcoin does, if not more, for reshaping this planet into something desirable.

Without further ado, here’s the video: (We’re very likely going to be discussing it many times in the future, so you might want to take notes!)

DEFCAD is going to be a Bittorrent-like program, totally peer-to-peer, that has its’ own search for any and all 3D files online, especially the illegal ones. (Right now it’s just a website listing printable gun parts. Later it will be be a full peer-to-peer protocol listing all kinds of products, including those that unfairly cost too much, such as a prosthetic limb.)

Not only will this peer-to-peer software be revolutionary in of itself, encouraging the public to embrace a world without patents and copyrights and federal controls on the internet… But it will all be funded by Bitcoin!

They are already taking bitcoin donations now, and it says on their site: “Fund once. Download forever.” -But I have a strong feeling after watching that video that bitcoin payments will be more central to DEFCAD to maintain ongoing costs or for other reasons. Since the initial downloads are already on DEFCAD.com for free, and I don’t know how they would run the ongoing project all from donation alone, I would suspect that there will be “premium” files sold for bitcoins on his product in the future.

What the nature of that premium-ship would be, I can only guess. One possibility would be selling the CAD files that the designers upload into a storefront inside… With funds split between the DEFCAD team and the designer. But again, that’s speculation, they may be able to do everything they want on donations alone. Time will tell.

This news has huge implications for the course of human events. Considering that we will now have:

…Meaning that now anyone, anywhere with a net connection & a 3D printer can download any data or even physical object they desire, even patented or illegal objects, and even pay for it all too…

Without anyone, not even your government, ever knowing that you did it.

Privacy will be the norm, not the exception. Governments will be powerless to intrude. Lobbies like the MPAA & RIAA will be forced to fight over scraps, not actual laws. Intellectual Property laws themselves will certainly change quite a bit… If not be erased entirely. This is a very good thing in my opinion, they were unfair and unnatural anyway. The Mises crowd agrees.

This trend of distributed services could mark the beginning of the end for statism itself.

So what will DEFCAD’s arrival mean for bitcoin specifically?

It will be another industry that will depend on the coin… And this one could grow HUGE, as in ‘every home in the world’ huge, once the 3D printer meets its’ full potential. (Think: Replicators from Star Trek.) Along with the online gambling and black markets online, this will be another sector that couldn’t really exist without money that gets around governments. Bitcoin will be permanently in demand from the needs of these industries, no matter how fickle speculators are with it’s price.

So best of luck to Cody and the DEFCAD team! I’m rooting for you, and look forward to downloading my first CAD files from your software.

For more about the 3D revolution from Cody’s mouth, here’s a spot he did on Glen Beck’s show from January: